A major problem faced by an online advertising publisher is to forecast available inventory of advertisement impressions for sale to online advertisers. Online advertisers would like to target users visiting certain web pages with certain demographics, geographies, behavioral interests, as well as many other attributes. For example, an advertiser may want to target users in a publisher's website with the following profile: female, over 30 years old, with a behavioral interest in home improvement. Thus an online advertising publisher needs to make accurate forecasts for any combination of those attributes efficiently.
The problem of forecasting available inventory of advertisement impressions for sale to online advertisers that are untargeted is considerably easier to solve since it involves predicting available advertisement impressions for each advertising property managed by the online publisher. One method of solving this problem is described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,801,945, entitled “SYSTEMS AND METHODS FOR PREDICTING TRAFFIC ON INTERNET SITES”. However, the problem of forecasting available inventory of advertisement impressions for targeting profiles of attributes is complicated by the fact that there may be thousands of targeting attributes. The greater the number of advertising properties managed by the online publisher the more complicated the problem becomes to forecast the thousands of targeting attributes across the advertising properties.
What is needed is a way for an online publisher to forecast available inventory of online advertisement impressions for targeting profiles of attributes. Such a system and method should be able to make accurate forecasts for any combination of those attributes in a fraction of a second.